CTO at a healthcare company with 51-200 employees
CA's Service Catalog is an outdated product
What is most valuable?
The ability to add external databases.
How has it helped my organization?
In combination with Automation for Cloud Services, it has increased the ability to dynamically allocate Virtual Machines for test and development.
What needs improvement?
Pretty much all of its areas: It has a very outdated UX - circa Windows XP It has a lot of errors in its documentation. It has a lot of undocumented quirks and limitations. It has a lot of bugs. Its UX does not support HTML 5 style controls resulting in the need to build very bizarre workarounds. Its API architecture is not orthogonal.
For how long have I used the solution?
6 months
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What was my experience with deployment of the solution?
Yes. As listed above.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
Yes, in using the Service Catalog Editor it would periodically require that IE be restarted because of the memory leaks.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Yes. Because features like Copy Linked Service did not work properly, services replicated at various levels of the hierarchy had to be simply copied, resulting in a maintenance nightmare when scaled to a significant number of services.
How are customer service and support?
Customer Service: Horrific. Unless an explicit and costly "service issue" was raised through the enterprise support agreement, CA had zero interest in accepting problem reports. And when a request was made for improved or corrected documentation through the Enterprise support agreement, the response was "we do not receive enough such requests so no such support is available, - CA Services will contact you shortly to discuss providing this custom function".. No such followup contact was provided.Technical Support: Horrific. See above.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
No prior solution existed. The main reason for the choice of this solution was because Microsoft System Center did not adequately present its support for Linux and thus management perceived there to be no support.
How was the initial setup?
Complex. Too many moving parts that are poorly and sometimes incorrectly documented.
What about the implementation team?
Multiple vendors
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
Yes. Microsoft Systems Center, IBM Tivoli.
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
Operations Expert at a healthcare company with 51-200 employees
Great flexibility for every environment, but minor issues creep up including product stability
Buyer's Guide
Clarity SM
July 2025
Learn what your peers think about Clarity SM. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: July 2025.
861,524 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Buyer's Guide
Download our free Clarity SM Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros
sharing their opinions.
Updated: July 2025
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